25 May 2019 10:00 AM

And no, I don’t want one of the days off in the early part of the year moved to the middle of the Autumn. That’s one of those horrible, tidy-minded ideas beloved of the sort of people who also propose permanent British Summer Time, a fixed date for Easter and fluoride in everyone’s water and who used to want us to drive on the right and join the euro.

Liberal Democrats, in other words.

More intriguing is the idea of making every weekend a long weekend, with the introduction of a four-day week. I actually worked a four-day week, back in the Eighties, at that fine news agency the General Press Service, so have some experience of this. Here are some things to bear in mind.

One, the origins were a bit murky. I think the idea originated during the years of pay controls in the Seventies, with the four-day week acting as a non-cash “pay rise”.

Two, each day was supposed to be ten hours long, although in my case the shift fell a good hour short of that on most days.

Three, on taking promotion (to assistant news editor or equivalent grade), you gave it up in return for more money. The thinking clearly was that four-day weeks were all very well for working grunts but the officer class was expected to put in a rather more solid appearance.

Four, this was a good arrangement from the employee point of view, because the point of being “officer class” was that you’d get the work done anyway, regardless of watching the clock. So take the money…

Fifth, when I went to The Guardian I found myself on a four and a half day week, otherwise known as the nine-day fortnight. The problem was the same, in that this generous leave entitlement (including six weeks’ holiday and eight bank holidays) didn’t always get taken.

I’m not knocking the idea. But in the age of mobiles, e-mails and constantly-contactable wage slaves, it’s a bit less radical than it would have been 30 years ago, when a silently-mouthed “Say I’m out” to one’s spouse or companion when they took the call would have been enough to head the bosses off at the pass.

Saturday miscellany

PIP pip, Theresa May. Rather like your immediate predecessor (but to a more pronounced extent) you seemed to measure your nice-person status by the extent to which you wheedled to people and organisations that will always hate you and your party. In your case, this opponent-hugging ranged all the way from our European enemies to the “trans” lobby. Dave tried to suck up to the “teacher unions” by sacking their hate figure Michael Gove, and was then shocked – shocked! – when Gove refused to back his pitiful “renegotiation” of Britain’s European Union membership thus helped pave the way for Cameron’s unlamented exit from Downing Street.

APPARENTLY, it’s BBC “women in sport” week this week. Isn’t it every week?

RADIO 4 has been reprising these past few days some of the work of Jeremy Hardy, who died earlier this year. The radical comedian was praised on his death for having been hard-hitting but never nasty. This is from Kenneth Clarke’s memoir Kind of Blue (Macmillan; 2016), referring to the pressures on his wife Gillian of shot and shell on the political battlefield: “Gillian made an angry and distressed call to the BBC after the comedian Jeremy Hardy had said that there were still some things that made life worthwhile - birdsong in the spring…and the prospect of seeing Kenneth Clarke go to his grave”. As Paul Johnson said in a different context, De mortuis nil nisi bunkum.

THE news that Oxford University is establishing a quota of places to be set aside for "disprivileged kids" must surely be the final spur the top independent schools need to establish an elite university of their own? To proof itself against interference by dribbling-idiot "Ministers" and bureaucrats, it should avoid charitable status, involvement in the student loan scheme and any other form of State subsidy.

I have resisted Hunter S. Thompson all my life, not least because I consider the notion of a “gonzo journalist” (a drug addict with a press card) to be about as meaningless as a “gonzo air-traffic controller”. So I resisted him. Until now. For £1, I picked up a near-pristine paperback copy of his collection The Great Shark Hunt (Picador; 1980), and I’ve been 75 per cent won over. The best of this stuff is genuinely good reporting, which I think I can recognise even if I haven’t always delivered it myself. And the 25 per cent? His obsessions, mainly his hatred of former President Nixon, which is far more deranged than the derangements of which Thompson accuses Tricky Dicky. He is scarcely less unbalanced in his loathing of Nixon’s 1968 Democrat opponent, the former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. But there’s some great stuff here.

THIS is just a tiny taster. It is 1972, and Senator George McGovern is campaigning to deny Nixon a second term. The Democrat challenger’s press secretary is called Kirby Jones. “If McGovern says today that the most important issue in the California primary is abolition of the sodomy statutes, Kirby will do everything in his power to convince everybody on the press bus that the sodomy statutes must be abolished…and if George decides tomorrow that his pro-sodomy gig isn’t making it with the voters, Kirby will get behind a quick press release to the effect that ‘new evidence from previously obscure sources’ has convinced the Senator that what he really meant to say was that sodomy itself should be abolished.”

18 May 2019 10:00 AM

WHEN reaching a certain age, it becomes possible to pass some sort of preliminary judgment on the forecasts and predictions with which the air was thick when you were younger.

For example, it was about 40 years ago that what was then known as the “silicon chip” arrived on the public consciousness. The first visible manifestation of the “micro” (its alternative name) was the replacement in offices of electric typewriters with “word processors”.

To the uninitiated, it sounded as if these devices would do the actual writing, but, of course, they were simply typewriters with screens instead of A4 and carbon paper.

More generally, the question of what the chip would actually mean for the economy was something that sharply divided opinion. From memory, one book suggested a permanent rise to four million unemployed or more as new technology wiped out swathes of jobs.

Another book took the opposite view, arguing that the microprocessor had been oversold and that any displaced jobs would be replaced by new ones.

Bernard Levin, in The Times, was similarly unconvinced by the notion that the chip promised/threatened an economic revolution. In his lifetime, Levin, there had been previous “revolutions”.

One was nuclear power, sold as being able to power the Queen Mary round the world on a piece of fuel the size of a walnut. Another was factory automation and the “efficiencies” it would bring.

Last sighted, said Levin, the Queen Mary was stuck at Long Beach, California, and Britain’s factories (this was before Mrs Thatcher fully hit her stride) were monuments to inefficiency.

To date, with more people in work than ever before, events seem to have borne out Book Two and Levin rather than Book One. But it’s a long game and this is very much an interim verdict.

More interesting may be a comparatively-unusual predictive book from that era, by Gordon Pask and Susan Curran, Micro Man (Century Publishing; 1982). Much of the (fascinating) text is concerned with the history and development of computers, but towards the end there is a section entitled: “The best and worst of possible worlds.”

Three future scenarios are imagined.

Here’s one that has held up pretty well:

“It is AD 2002. First children, and then adults, have become addicted to microprocessors of the kind available in 1982, but with greater storage capacity…Their addiction to peeky, linearised images of reality is so strong that when they do converse (and micro freaks are notoriously taciturn) they do so through their micros in programmatic terms.”

Sounds about right.

But more intriguing, I think, is a future scenario that has, in truth, relatively little to do with computers. A “Togetherness Movement”, originating in California, spreads to Europe and a “Togetherness Party” takes power (this is all happening round about now).

Its aim is that “everyone shares their psyche with everyone else”. Thus: “A typical statute…prohibits impediments to communication by physical boundaries of any kind. Property developers leap upon the bandwagon, and construct estates full of transparent and unsound-proofed buildings.”

A bizarre prediction, on the face of it, and one that has been completely falsified. Or has it?

True, we don’t have see-through blocks of flats, but hasn’t “togetherness”, under the guise of “community cohesion”, “British values” and “bringing our country together” become a key plank of Britain’s official ideology?

It can be seen in such strength-through-joy campaigns as those to encourage cycling or women’s football, in health promotions in which we are enjoined to do our bit, not least to alleviate pressure on “our” NHS, in demands that social media companies do not “allow” their customers to read only the sort of news with which they agree and that (presumably State) schools ought to be barred from faith-based admissions policies.

This last view is put forward in an article here suggesting religion is all very well in the home and at weekends, but that we should “let our children be together to learn the things they all need to know”. Such a statement implies that “school” is a neutral dissemination mechanism for universally agreed “facts” when education is, of course, highly ideological – not least in “togetherite” Britain.

Anyway, Pask and Curran’s “together” scenario is not without its problems. Occupants of transparent buildings “express opposition to the whole idea”. No kidding?

Saturday miscellany

A busy few days for the Grim Reaper, with farewells to Doris Day, Bob Hawke and, of course, Labour MP turned TV interrogator Brian Walden. You’d need to be of a certain age (see above) to recall Walden in his prime, in particular his brilliant technique. Typically, a senior hack politician would respond to a very wide question with an utterly bland statement (e.g. “it’s early days for the round-table talks on the future of Northern Ireland but we are hopeful”).

“Ah!” Walden would respond. “Now that’s very interesting.”

Alarm on the face of the hack politician, who did not imagine he had said anything much at all. Walden goes on to suggest that saying “early days” displays optimism that there will be “later days”, i.e. the talks will succeed.

Furious back-pedalling from the hack politician, who blurts out that everything is proving very difficult and could go wrong at any time. Lead item on the next news bulletin? “Round-table talks are on the point of collapse.”

MY first paper, when stuck for a story to fill a hole, would get some local councillor to refer to a notorious road-accident blackspot with the evergreen quote: “Must a child die before action is taken?” Aren’t all these “May urged to set departure date” items just a Westminster version of the same thing?

FAREWELL also to Jean Vanier, Canadian founder of the L’Arche disability charity. He spoke one Palm Sunday at Mass at Worth Abbey, opening his remarks: “I have longed to eat this meal with you.” If you are going to quote someone, why not go right to the top?”

CHRISTOPHER Booker recalls that, at the height of David Frost’s fame on both sides of the Atlantic, a baffled Arthur Koestler (author and intellectual) had to ask who Frost actually was. I feel the same way about Jeremy Kyle.

11 May 2019 10:00 AM

IN this week’s edition of The Spectator, Rory Sutherland, columnist and vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK, mentions in passing the long-ago injunction of Hong Kong financial secretary Sir John James Cowperthwaite that no economic statistics be collected because it would only encourage politicians to intervene in the economy.

Those of us who have no problem with government intervention have never been overly impressed, despite his having been credited with Hong Kong’s “Asian tiger” status.

But could he not have had a point about official statistics, albeit not the one he actually made?

I may not mind, even approve, political intervention in the economy, but have long railed against political intervention in private life. Indeed, it is noticeable that the decline of the former in the Eighties and Nineties was accompanied by the rise of the latter.

Along with this process, the search area for official data has expanded well beyond the big index numbers of yore – inflation, trade, growth, and so on – into some considerably more dubious areas, as if designed to lay the ground for more official interference in private lives.

From the recent release calendar of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), we have data for “Living alone: one-person households”. Why? Is it to justify the “loneliness Minister” that Theresa May has deemed a necessary component of her government?

Then there is “Exploring loneliness in children, Great Britain: 2018”. Are national statisticians the right people to explore children’s loneliness?

Some cases are borderline. “Socio-economic inequalities in avoidable mortality in England and Wales 2001-2017” is a topic that could yield some objective, useful data. Could.

And the main trouble with “Crime in England and Wales: year ending December 2018” is that decreasing numbers of people actually believe official crime figures.

Utterly clear-cut is the release headed “Developing a measure of controlling or coercive behaviour”. This is a classic example of the self-reinforcing loop between politics and official statistics.

The highly questionable offence of “controlling or coercive behaviour” was dreamed up during Mrs May’s tenure as Home Secretary and, to some of us, seemed to give the authorities a laissez-passer into relationships of which they disapproved. Now the statisticians are, apparently, going to give some spurious credibility to the whole notion.

Finally, what about “Personal and economic well-being in the UK: April 2019”? Here, in a nutshell, are the new and the old, economic statistics of relevance to the authorities in their task of trying to make everyone better off alongside dubious data relating to how people “feel”.

Thus, economic well-being is measured by disposable income. Fine. And personal well-being is, apparently, to do with “anxiety levels”. No thanks

We need, I feel, the spirit of old Hong Kong.

Saturday miscellany

OFF at a tangent is something that occurred to me on reading the (very fine and highly recommended) second of three volumes of the memoirs of former Cabinet Minister Alan Johnson, Please, Mr Postman (Bantam Press; 2014). Together with the first volume, we learned the following: that the young Alan, effectively orphaned, was spared a children’s home because his 16-year-old sister persuaded the child welfare people to give them a council flat and she raised him; that postmen in the Sixties and Seventies would combine their delivery rounds with moonlighting as paper boys in remote areas; that they would also feed pet cats by arrangement with the householder when they were on holiday, and that they would even deliver coal, potatoes and manure for people, and give lifts in their vans.

I assume Mr Johnson is aware that none of the above could happen now and that, although the rot set in during the late Eighties, the real “nationalisation of private life” occurred during the New Labour years, in which he played a prominent role.

NEW Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt declares that British forces veterans will not be “pursued unfairly” through the courts over “unfounded allegations”. Take out the “not” in that last sentence to appreciate fully the banality of this statement.

INTRIGUING planning notices from the City of London published in City AM on Tuesday. In Great St Helen’s, EC3, there is to be a “temporary installation of a sculpture ‘It was only a matter of time before we found the Pyramid and forced it open’, by Salvatore Arancio…to be taken down on or before June 1 2020”. Over in Bishopsgate, EC2, there is to be the temporary installation of another sculpture, for the same period, this being “Stagnight”, by Michael Lyons. In Leadenhall Street, the temporary sculpture will be “Within a realm of relative form”, by Lawrence Weiner. No fewer than 11 such temporary installations are listed by the City authorities. Amid all this artistry, it is almost a relief to come across a planning notice relating to premises in Old Broad Street, EC2: “Installation of a new shopfront.”

May Bank Holiday Monday last week saw a fine piece of drama on Radio 4, Road to Oxford, by Douglas Livingstone. You can still catch it on the replay thing – it went out at 2.15pm on May 6. The backdrop being Oxford’s May morning jollities, this put me in mind of an ill-fated expedition many years ago to the city of dreaming spires. It was 1987 or 1988, and a friend and I heard that the pubs stayed open all day on May Day (this was just before all-day opening came to England and Wales). This isn’t really true anyway, and even if it were, we travelled on the bank holiday Monday which, as in most years including this one, did not coincide with May 1. Inevitable disappointment when we collided with reality. Nothing for it but to retreat to the one place where drink could be served at any time – British Rail.

04 May 2019 10:00 AM

A fortnight ago, I meandered into the whole question of fractional reserve banking, the ability of banks to re-lend more than £90 of every pound deposited, meaning that £90, when re-deposited, becomes the base for £80 of fresh loans, and so on…until the last ten per cent is gone.

Thus, I wrote, is money created in the modern world - essentially, because someone has gone into debt.

What a con.

Thanks to a paper sent by a friend and reader, I now discover this is just an intermediate con and the real racket lies one step beyond, with banks simply creating money out of thin air. Once I have a proper grasp of this, I’ll get back to you on it.

In the meantime, here’s a second of the Big Three con tricks, limited corporate liability. I wrote my second ever opinion piece for The Guardian on this, and afterwards was, I believe, regarded round the office as a somewhat overcaffeinated young man, albeit jolly enthusiastic.

You wait, I thought. This one is going to blow.

That was 29 years ago. Still, one day…

Limited liability is a wonderful wheeze whereby business owners can walk away from their debts, leaving society – whether trade creditors or employees – to pick up the pieces. Long before the financial crisis, this was the original case of profits being privatised and losses socialised.

All you need to enter this magic protection racket are those little letters PLC (in Britain), Inc (US), SA (France), Pty Ltd (Australia), and so on…

Surely, you ask, there is more to it than that?

Not really, although there are a couple of qualifications.

The first is that, while anyone can apply to incorporate their enterprise, the value of limited liability is, er, limited for smaller businesses. Banks and other lenders aren’t stupid (whatever signs there may be to the contrary) and will usually demand a personal guarantee from the owner or owners before advancing a loan.

The second is that, since 1986, it has been possible to pursue the directors of a company for civil damages for creditors if they can be shown to have knowingly traded while insolvent or failed to minimise the loss to creditors.

Other than that, this is pretty much a one-way bet.

But its justification is hard to fathom. Laws against theft of property or injury to the person are pretty easy to explain to the proverbial man from Mars in terms of natural justice. But by what right does an inanimate company become a person in law, required to hand over to its (human) owners all the money it makes but to retain in its fictional persona the money it loses?

The only half-plausible explanation I have ever heard is that limited liability allows companies to continue beyond the lifespans of their founders. But surely some legal mechanism can be devised to deliver this benefit that doesn’t involve shrugging off hard-to-pay debts?

Oh, and the third con mentioned earlier? The mysterious concept of “trusts”, the only non-human entities that can own their own assets without themselves having a human owner.

But that’s for another day.

When everyone’s responsible, no-one is

I rolled up at the polling station Thursday evening not entirely sure which local authorities were submitting their representatives for re-election: West Sussex (county), Mid-Sussex (district) or the town council (what would be a parish council in rural areas). It turned out to be these last two, but it does make you wonder why we, in common with much of England, need three tiers of local government.

On a piece for the Lion & Unicorn site in August 2015, I went into this question in more detail but for now I’d just say that I suspect the present system – muddied lines of authority and itty-bitty elections in which some councillors are up for election some times and others at others – suits local and national bureaucrats just fine. No accountability to the voters whatsoever. Bliss!

Miscellany on Saturday

TIME was when business names were reasonably self-explanatory: Harrison & Co, brewer/motor mechanic/auctioneer. Now we live in the age of assorted “service” outfits with names such as Magenta 9. Here are some of the people who contributed to City AM this week, complete with their job descriptions.

On Tuesday:

Jennifer Emery is global people leader at Arup, and the author of Leading for organisational change

Emily Foges is chief executive of Luminance

On Wednesday:

Lucinda Kingham is senior account executive at Firefly Communications

On Thursday:

Adrian Moorhouse is managing director of Lane4

Don’t go down the mine, dad.

AT London Bridge this week, we endured a mid-afternoon practice alarm, which involved a good couple of minutes of honking sirens interspersed with calls for “Inspector Sands”, the rail people’s babyish “code” for anti-terrorist police. This was followed by: “Due to [they meant ‘owing to’, but never mind] a public emergency, passengers must leave this area immediately. Please obey the instructions of staff.” Obey a lot of ticket collectors? Don’t think so.

SOME time after everyone else, I have read my first Martyn Waites novel, a spooky thriller called The Old Religion (ZAFFRE; 2019). Very good too. I should have skipped the author interview at the end, much of which comprised a boilerplate lovey anti-Brexit rant about how Leave voters were “lied to”. But I read it. First and, I fear, the last.

CAN I ask private-school heads and other defenders of independent education to stop using the language of their enemies? This week, Barnaby Lenon, the former headmaster of Harrow, in an otherwise fine address, was just the latest to speak against the “abolition” of independent schools. The State can “abolish” only those entities that it owns: grammar schools, the Trooping of the Colour, capital punishment, Westmoreland County Council, the Educational Maintenance Allowance – even the monarchy. Regarding independent schools, it can “prohibit”, "suppress" or “ban” them, both words sounding suitably menacing.

I can't be the first to suggest that, given the uselessness of the British State, the sacking of Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary may prove a replay of Peter Mandelson's 2001 Cabinet departure over the "Hinduja passport affair." In other words, we'll find he did nothing wrong.

PPS TO end where we began. Many years ago, in a friendly argument about the (to me) iniquities of limited liability, my interlocutor said that even were it to be swept away, one could recreate all the benefits with a fairly simple and inexpensive insurance policy, available for businesses.

Was he not, I asked, forgetting something?

What?

The insurance companies themselves would no longer enjoy limited liability. No-one would. The party would be over.